Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a wireless voice messaging device and more particularly to a wireless voice messaging device for receiving voice messages and storing voice messages. The wireless voice messaging device is further designed to fit into a cassette player and play the voice messages back from storage via the cassette player. The wireless voice messaging device can be further adapted as a two-way, wireless voice messaging device for both sending and receiving voice messages.
Wireless voice messaging devices such as pagers for receiving voice messages are well known in the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,965,569 to Bennett et al. describes a paging receiver for receiving analog information having at least one voice message, and includes a memory, a receiving means, a converting means, and a decoder. The receiving means detects the presence of electromagnetic energy representing paging information and applies the information to the converting means. The converting means converts the received information, which is in the form of analog signals, such as real time audio speech signals, to digital information representative of the analog voice information. The digital information is then stored in the memory of the selected receiver. The decoder functions to control the receiving means, to alert the paging user, store, recall and playback voice messages.
In response to user generated inputs, the paging receiver can select a digitized voice message stored in the memory of the receiver and reconvert the digitized voice message to an analog signal via the converting means. The analog signal representative of the original analog voice message is then applied to a so-called support module, which is also controlled by the decoder. The support module supplies the analog signal representative of the original analog voice message to a plurality of annunciation transducers contained in the support module so that it may be reproduced.
As is known by those skilled in the art, minimizing the size and weight of a pager is a critical design criteria. Because of the use of the support module to play the incoming voice messages, the size and weight of the above-described pager is necessarily, and undesirably, increased. Additionally, while the size and weight of the support module is still undesirably large when considering the field of pagers, when considering the size of the speakers or annunciation transducers for purposes of reproducing the voice messages, the size is small and results in a relatively poor quality reproduced voice message.
Furthermore, it would be desirable to provide a two-way voice messaging device. In such devices, it is further required to provide a microphone enabling a user of the device, desiring to send a voice message, to provide the voice message to the memory of the two-way voice messaging device for later transmission by a transmitter. Incorporating such a microphone and accompanying circuitry into existing pagers again requires additional space in the pager thereby adding to its size and weight. As is evident, it would be very desirable to provide a two-way voice messaging device which is capable of high quality sound reproduction.